OUT OF DARKNESS, SHINING LIGHT
by Petina Gappah (Faber £16.99, 320pp)
Set after the death of Victorian explorer David Livingstone, Petina Gappah’s novel is part of a trend for putting history’s supposed bit-part players centre-stage.
Incredibly, Livingstone’s African retinue trekked across the continent so that his body could be buried in Britain. Gappah fictionalises two of them, as we cut from his cook, Halima, to his attendant, Jacob Wainwright, a freed slave full of Christian zeal.
While we’re given a ringside seat at the desires and resentments that flare up during their arduous quest, Gappah’s decision to mimic old-fashioned literary style makes for a stodgy reading experience, in which everything is told and nothing shown.
She tells us in an afterword that she spent almost 20 years on the book, and you can’t help but feel she’s too close to the material to be able to gauge its effect on the casual reader. It’s a shame — everything’s here, except that vital, elusive spark to bring it all to life.
APEIROGON
APEIROGON by Colum McCann (Bloomsbury £18.99, 480pp)
by Colum McCann (Bloomsbury £18.99, 480pp)
Structured as 1,001 numbered segments, this non-fiction novel explores the experience of two men — one Arab, one Jewish — who campaign together for peace, each having lost a daughter to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In 1997, Rami Elhanan’s 13-year-old daughter Smadar died in an attack by Palestinian suicide bombers; ten years later, Bassam Aramin’s ten-year-old daughter Abir was killed by a bullet fired by an Israeli border guard.
McCann’s tricksy narrative — less a novel than a sort of piecemeal almanac of the region’s history — feels a rather self-congratulatory frame for these powerful stories, as if he really feels he’s teaching us something profound about the book’s subject when he explains that its title refers to ‘a shape with countably infinite sides’.
By far the strongest part is the short middle segment of verbatim testimony from Rami and Bassam — in other words, the part he didn’t write.
HERE WE ARE
HERE WE ARE by Graham Swift (Simon & Schuster £14.99, 208pp)
by Graham Swift (Simon & Schuster £14.99, 208pp)
Graham Swift has always excelled at writing characters who muse on their regrets, but since 2011’s Wish You Were Here, about British farming and the Iraq War, his fiction has become even more downbeat.
This unfolds in his usual, unshowily accomplished style, drifting seamlessly between long-ago heartache and the moment in which it’s recalled.
The main action takes place in 1959, as Ronnie, a young magician, makes a name for himself on the Brighton stage with his leggy fiancee, Evie, in a show compered by Ronnie’s old Army pal, Jack Robinson.
As the story unfolds from Evie’s perspective 50 years later, we see that Ronnie and Evie never tied the knot, with Ronnie vanishing, his whereabouts still unknown.
Although Swift remains as persuasive as ever on how unspoken emotion can mutate into irrevocable acts, he seems well within his comfort zone here, and ultimately this is something of a slight, dry tale, nearly as bland as the title.
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